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Re: Why spam is a problem.

2002-08-14 00:09:32

on 8/13/2002 11:25 PM John C Klensin wrote:

be useful, but that the real remedies involving making it
illegal to send UCE, to causing UCE to be sent, and to lie about
whether something was "requested" or "opted in" to... and then
putting serious, criminal-law, teeth into whatever statutes are
enacted.

But that requires much more
political will than I'm seeing (anywhere !), and technical quick
fixes aren't going to help a whole lot other than with tracing,
IMO.

One thing the IETF (or more appropriately perhaps, ISOC) could possibly do
here is to prepare some sort of document describing the problem from an
analytical perspective, clearly stating that it is a socio-political
problem that technology cannot handle. Political bodies would have to act
on it, which is not guaranteed. But at least the case would be made that
it is the politicos' problem, not the geeks' problem.

Some potential outline points:

  lost productivity

  non-contributory staffing requirements (pure overhead)

  bandwidth costs from 95th percentile billing (ignore end-user costs)

  recipient filters demand processing, bandwidth and staff resources

  transport filters are non-discriminatory as to content, hit spammers
    *and* bystanders alike

  protocol solutions guaranteed to mismatch with other jurisdictions
    ("NO-UCE" means something different in korea vs norway)

  technical efforts can only address symptoms (forgery, etc)

summarily recommending political solutions, with the specific message
being that this is a socio-political problem along the lines of property
trespass, etc, which each jurisdiction will have to resolve

-- 
Eric A. Hall                                        http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols          http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/



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